Broken Social Scene

When Broken Social Scene showed up to play an instore at New York's prestigious Other Music, there were five times as many people in line to see them as there had been two months previous. Broken Social Scene, the 14-piece Toronto collective responsible for this year's sublime You Forgot It in People may seem like an overnight success, but they're anything but naïve, inexperienced and starry-eyed. Most of them have been making music for years, and all of them are remarkably well-versed in the ins and outs of the music industry. Riding a wave of grassroots publicity and leasing their album to a major while retaining an alarming degree of control, Broken Social Scene are essentially doing everything right, avoiding the pitfalls of success while making sure that their music reaches as many people as possible.

The live Broken Social Scene experience is a similar blend of enthusiasm and virtuosity. The term "collective" is often used to describe a group of musicians each contributing their divided attention to a project, but with this band, it's clear that everybody involved plays a distinct and massive role in the band's powerful and diverse sound. Kevin Drew, the band's de facto frontman, is the group's emotional core. The experimental touches he adds to the band come across just as sincere and honest as his singing, which takes on even more potent immediacy in a live setting. Brendan Canning, like the Mike Mills of early R.E.M., sneaks unforgettable hooks into atypical basslines. Justin Peroff's drumming is confident and considerate, adding new layers of rhythmic intrigue to the band without ever detracting from the other instruments. On stage, Leslie Feist is a shitkicking goddess of the highest order, belting out unbelievably strong vocals that perfectly contrast Drew's slow-burning delivery. Andrew Whiteman is the dark lord of the massive guitar hook, filling out the band's sound with both grace and energy.

Of course, a member-by-member breakdown is only so useful in describing music so clearly born of interaction, understanding, and consideration. The members of Broken Social Scene are, above all else, real people-- talented, knowledgeable, and unbelievably kind people, still completely devoid of any kind of ironic detachment or rockstar attitude. I had the privilege of sitting down for a meal with a very tired Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, with touring bassist and solo artist Jason Collett, in the middle of their first post-hype U.S. tour. Having put out the first Broken Social Scene record together, Brendan and Kevin are the default interview subjects. But if you're lucky enough to catch the band on their upcoming tour, I suggest you make a point of talking to as many members of the band as possible-- though they call themselves a collective, each one of them always seems to have something interesting to say.

Pitchfork: Are you guys feeling pressure now, like this is your window of opportunity and your one big chance at making it?

Brendan: Yeah.

Kevin: I don't think it's pressure, it's just... enjoy it. Because after this, who knows what'll happen. A show like the one we just played, that's really where we have the most fun, where you're stepping on each other and nobody cares because they're part of the basement jam.

Pitchfork: And everybody's there to see you, not to drink and hang out.

Kevin: There's no smoking, it's just small... I mean, when will we do Other Music again? That could be it.

Pitchfork: Have you been playing mostly smaller venues?

Brendan: The past couple nights, we played sold-out shows to about 150 people, in Detroit closer to 100. So we're playing all these shows. I mean, personally we treat all these shows like, "We're going to play as good as we can, because next time we want to play for more people."

Pitchfork: Are you hoping to play bigger places?

Kevin: Yeah, we want to play soft-seaters-- you know, play the 2,000 soft-seaters.

Brendan: Irving Plaza. It's be nice to come back to New York and play Irving Plaza.

Kevin: But we'll never leave the establishment of people screaming and yelling and being in bars-- that's great. We definitely need to keep the idealism of small, intimate places, but I'd like to be able to take my wife with me. And to do that, to pay to take her along with us, we'd have to take it to a certain level. But I'd never ever want to do a stadium show, to put it in context. That's the worst place to see music.

Pitchfork: Some big outdoor shows can be even worse, I think.

Brendan: No, I'll disagree because stadium shows, you just file in.. Outdoor shows, you know, the sun is shining... I've seen lots of good big outdoor shows.

Kevin: It depends-- if you have to pay six bucks for a fucking water, that's a terrible environment for a show.

Pitchfork: Are there any outdoor shows where you're allowed to bring your own water?

Brendan: I don't know. I suppose it's been a while. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: You guys just signed to Mercury Records. Are you guys making good money off that?

Kevin: No, there's a lot of us involved. What we're making is very, very realistic. It's very nice, it's nothing big, it'll allow us to live till December as a band, and try to make more money by going out and touring.

Brendan: Longer than December, maybe.

Kevin: It's all our own money anyway. It all comes from us, it's like a bank. They happen to come at a good time when suddenly everyone was broke and they didn't know how they were going to continue. But they were very sweet about it, they let us do a lot of things we wanted to do, they gave us a lot of room, they didn't pressure us into anything. They let us write up our own contract! They wouldn't budge on a couple of things due to formality, but they were really doing it for us. These records are not going to be owned by them. They will be for a little bit, but eventually they'll come back to us.

Brendan: It's like a lease.

Kevin: It was about the people that were involved, we have so many people, it just seemed like the right thing to do. We could've spent a few years building up our own fanbase, but we've already done that, we've come from that. We've all been working very, very hard for the last many years making music. This is the point that we realized that if we're going to exist as a collective, bring our loves on the road, try to be human beings and have families and do this, we're going to have to step into a world that we're maybe not so happy about. As a collective we chose this, not everybody wanted to do it, but we chose this. And we'll see. It could destroy us, I'm hoping that it won't. Because we have a lot of the power in our own hands-- not in a power-hungry way, but in a way that they respect us.

Brendan: There's also not the feeling that we're not deserving or we're not eligible, or we shouldn't be here, or we've got to spend a lot of time at a certain level. I mean, a lot of us-- I've been putting out albums for 12 years. Now, I've got a record, a couple records with Broken Social Scene that I'm really proud of, and I feel like we can maintain on any level with guitar pop bands, or indie rock-- we're ultimately an indie rock band.

Kevin: We're all indie rock kids, basically. And everybody brings something different, Jason's not an indie rock kid as much as he's a rock kid.

Jason: They're indie rock kids that learned how to play their instruments.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

Brendan: Even Sonic Youth were saying that about their latest record-- how they're more comfortable noodling on guitars now, they all feel like they've mastered the instruments. Whereas they may have sounded fine to themselves eight years ago, but now they're like "now we feel like we can jam more."

Kevin: I need to work on my noodling, personally.

Jason: We're indie rock that learned how to play our instruments, but didn't forget how great it felt to play 'em like we didn't.

Kevin: Oh, Jason's on a roll right now. Jason, you should've written the review!

Pitchfork: I think part of the reason the record's been doing really well is that you've perfected a sound that a lot of bands have been working towards recently-- great atmospheric production, rock songs that are fully formed but not necessarily straightforward.

Brendan: No, not straightforward rock songs. You get the road show when we go out on tour. We can't get too deep, unless we just have scads of cash at our disposal.

Kevin: Then we can get the sounds we want out of everything. Our producer, David Newfield, has a lot to do with that record's sound. We're all producers in our own right, and we all had a hard time giving in and letting this guy make our record because we could all have done it ourselves. But we all realized right away that he was going to create a sound we didn't know how to create. So we were going to bring something to him, and we were going to create this sound together, and he was incredible to that end. He deserves full credit for making an album that's so interesting that I can still listen to it once a week, but I can listen to it without an ego because my involvement in it is part of a huge... there are a lot of people.

Pitchfork: Right.

Kevin: In that way, you're not trying to hold it to your chest, you're not trying to hold it to yourself, you're actually letting go. You actually have to respect everybody there, because everybody's just as huge in their part as you are. Brendan and I have become the "interview guys," because people need to make it manageable. But you watch when Apostle of Hustle comes out, when Jason Collett's record starts taking off, or Leslie Feist starts to take off. We just happened to put this record out together first. But as soon as these people's records come out, as soon as people get their identities out there, people will want to talk to everyone, I think. These are albums that we're excited for. We don't know how this band's going, because we don't know how everybody's projects are going.

Brendan: We have a reservoir of other guitar players at our disposal.

Kevin: Because the people putting out their records are going to go out and do their thing. So we're always losing and gaining, losing and gaining. So in the end, we're trying to promote us. It's a we. There are filmmakers, photographers, musicians, we're trying to take our 32-block radius and really go at it together. Sometimes you get up and you don't want to do that-- you're tired and you just want to have your own opinion and say, "This is how it's supposed to be fucking done, I don't have to be patient any more."

Pitchfork: Yeah.

Kevin: And the right day, you wake up, you listen to everyone, you have patience with everyone. You don't have to pay attention to how it's supposed to be done, and you just do it. And you do it because you're living, and there's your profession. Your profession is separate, and right now our profession is that we're musicians. But I guarantee you, I'm a lover of my wife well before I'm a musician. Jason's got kids-- he's got an 11-year-old, and a 13-year-old-- that's a life! And that's something I pride on with my band, that we've established our lives already. The drug sections of our lives, they're done.

Brendan: Almost. [Laughs]

Kevin: Well, okay, pretty much. [Laughs] The point being is that, I like to think we are different. Because I like to think that we give a shit. There may be other bands out there that don't give a shit, and they sign their lives away. I put blood on my contracts with the labels for a reason. It represents the idea that I'm going to join you, and I'm going to give you some of my blood. I can't give it all to you, but here's a little bit of it, a little token.

Pitchfork: One thing I really enjoy about the band is that every member really seems to be making a massive contribution, there's a ton of variety.

Kevin: Well, that's, I believe, why you're sitting here today. If it was all me singing Dinosaur Jr. songs, we wouldn't be sitting here. I think that what [Pitchfork Editor] Ryan [Schreiber] heard in this CD is a lot of people contributing. I have no idea how we're going to sound in the press, how we're going to come across trying to say, "Yeah, it's honest, it's this, it's that," but that's what it is. I'm not saying that won't be destroyed, it could be. I'd like to think we're going to keep going with the idea that every now and again, you can just stop, catch your breath, and remind yourself to breathe.

Kevin: Arts & Crafts happened because our friend Jeffrey was working in the major label industry, and he had to get out. We knew it, he knew it, everybody knew it. Brendan and I proposed to him that he start a label, to put out this record. He said yes, and right away, we were in the studio. He started it up, went with it, we looked within our roster of friends, and we knew that we should do it. These guys have taken it to a whole other level. We have the Start, we have Jason Colett, we hopefully have Leslie Feist.

Brendan: Everybody seems to be really peaking right now. Stars, our group, this band Metric-- everybody seems to be hitting their stride right now.

Kevin: We're all doing fine, we're all happy-- this is a really exciting time for our little group.

Pitchfork: At the show, you mentioned that most of the people in the crowd probably downloaded your album-- do you think that file sharing has helped you or harmed you at this point?

Kevin: It's helped us!

Brendan: Definitely helped. At least the people who are downloading are at least aware. People are kind of sheepish about it, they come up to us at shows and they say, "Yeah, I downloaded your album."

Kevin: "Yeah, I downloaded your album, I hope that's okay, I couldn't find it." You couldn't find it for a while.

Pitchfork: I got mine from HMV.ca, which just got bought up by Amazon, which is a shame.

Brendan: You know, we were #1!

Pitchfork: On HMV.ca??

Brendan: You don't know that?

Kevin: That review made us go to #1-- we beat Celine Dion! They had to put up a notice, like, "We have no more Broken Social Scene records!"

Kevin: I think she knocked us off. We were #1 and then she came out, maybe?

Pitchfork: It would be great if you knocked her off, and Celine Dion was on the phone with her publicist going...

Brendan: 'What the fuck!!'

Pitchfork: 'Bring me Broken Social Scene!'

Brendan: Except, it would be in a Quebequois accent.

Kevin: Do it for us!

Brendan: I can't do it. I can't.

Pitchfork: No Celine Dion impression?

Brendan: No.

Pitchfork: Aww. I do think that file sharing has helped you guys a lot.

Kevin: I'd love it if they figured something out. I'll be perfectly honest with you, it'd be great if they figured something out. I don't think music should be free.

Pitchfork: Are you following this thing Apple's been doing.

Brendan: I do think music should be free, though. Music is free. We borrow it at the library, we look it up in an index, borrow what we want to hear. It's like taking a book out of the library, it's the same thing.

Pitchfork: That's an interesting way of looking at it.

Brendan: And maybe the CD you burned starts skipping and you want to buy it. Chances are, if we go to a town and someone downloaded the record, maybe they'll care enough to come to the show.

Kevin: And bring a friend.

Brendan: Yeah, exactly. I have a friend who went to the Manitoba show in Toronto, and he left with a t-shirt and told me, "Well, I burned their CD, I have to support them somehow." Someone comes out, buys a t-shirt, it all works.

Kevin: We had CD protection put on our record.

Brendan: It's a real bitch for people who have iPods.

Kevin: We got taken for a sham with CD protection.

Pitchfork: Why did you have that put on?

Brendan: We didn't know it.

Kevin: We didn't, it was a mix-up.

Brendan: We turned our backs for a second.

Kevin: A lot of people were really mad at us.

Pitchfork: It's funny, because I downloaded the CD and then bought it-- that's the second time that's happened to me with a copy-protected CD. It seems really stupid to me.

Kevin: It's the most ridiculous thing, and we're embarrassed that we're involved in it.

Brendan: It's a panic mood more than anything.

Kevin: They do need to figure something out, though, the industry's going to crumble.

Pitchfork: I don't even think that's why the industry's going to crumble.

Pitchfork: I've heard that in France, CD sales are going up because the labels have completely changed what acts they're signing and how they're doing business.

Brendan: The Canadian A&R departments... I don't want to say they're "fucking clueless."

Kevin: They're fucking clueless. Our industry is based on social parties. There are a lot of good people within that industry doing good things.

Brendan: Mainly, favors. I think we're in a fortunate position because, for whatever reason, this record's been embraced. I think people will want to buy the record, what else can you say?

Pitchfork: I saw the video for "Stars and Sons" online, I think that's a good single.

Kevin: I think that's a good representation of the band, yeah. We're going to do "Lover's Spit" as a single.

Brendan: There might be two videos for "Lover's Spit", depending on how obscure the video or how much of an art project it is.

Kevin: It's my wife and I making out, filmed with a military camera-- it's just us making out in, like, super-slow motion with this camera.

Brendan: There's going to be at least six or seven videos for this record. And by the time we see the end of this, after UK touring, there'll be another record. I think the only thing we can do is to continue, to see how far it can actually go.

Kevin: And not get burned out on life!

Pitchfork: You guys won a Juno-- how did that happen?

Brendan: It's for best alternative album, and...

Kevin: The category was great! It was Buck 65, Royal City, Hot Hot Heat-- it was a nice category to be in. I was kind of against it because people called us against the first one, and I was like, "Dude, you have to send fifteen records in and pay 30 bucks!" But Jeffrey, he sent them in, and I got mad at him, but he was like, "No, it's okay, I sent CD-R's!" But I've gotta say, we won, and our parents were so proud of us!

Pitchfork: There was a whole ceremony?

Kevin: It was really cool, the main ceremony was the night after us, the night we were in there, it was like a bar mitzvah, it was hilarious.

Brendan: Very Canadian.

Kevin: They had to give 28 awards out, quickly, so we were in with best children's album, best gospel, best bluegrass-- I mean, we felt like we were in with the real musicians. And it was shit the next night, we wanted nothing to do with that. And then we won and we were really happy, and a lot of people in the industry were really sweet to us. It was just nice. And it actually costs four hundred bucks a Juno, but they gave us ten for free. So they were good to us.

Pitchfork: Wait, wait-- they make you pay for them??

Kevin: That's what we had heard, but they didn't live up to it.

Pitchfork: That seems like a stupid kind of award!

Kevin: Canada is... it's a great country, but it's a bit weird at times, especially the entertainment industry. It's very much a box. Fortunately, though, they do focus in on a lot of bands. Let me say this: what happens a lot of the time is, they focus in on a couple of bands. My father already pointed out to me that in the Toronto weeklies, they've got to stop talking about [Broken Social Scene], The Hidden Cameras, or The Constantines. There's a huge support system in Toronto-- a lot of writers, journalists, and as I said, their crowning moments are favors. They want to help people out, they want the underdogs to do well. And that's what the country's art is based on-- on helping the underdogs. It's a wonderful thing we have going.